[Orig to FB, written in response to Roger Sollenberger’s “DOJ Removed Record of Multiple FBI Interviews with Underage Trump Accuser, Epstein Data Shows.”]
Remember when there were a million FBI agents working 25 hours a day 8 days a week, poring over a gajillion Epstein files to make sure that no survivor was exposed and no innocent party’s reputation was tarnished. Clearly not. But there are personnel records that show whether or to what extent those claims were actually true — records that trace who issued orders, when, and to whom, and so on. A roadmap, so to speak.
A bit more obscurely, remember how Pam Bondi said “there are tens of thousands of pictures and videos. And it’s all with little kids, so the FBI has to go through every one.” That was secretly videotaped: it was Bondi talking privately to someone she trusted, not Bondi performing for Trump. What she said was likely to be crudely true. More recently, Massey reaffirmed that at a non-working dinner, Bondi told him (in Massey’s words) that “all that was left was c*ld p*rn, and it was really disgusting, and nobody wanted to see it.”
Now, note that in dump after dump, the result of the DOJ’s work has been consistently shoddy in inconsistent ways: poorly obscured PDFs, exposure of survivors’ names, withdrawn documents, evidence ledgers and cross-referemces that reveal missing documents, etc.
I doubt there really were a thousand agents working around the clock, because — kewl internet theories about DOGE killing Adobe licenses aside — the result has been so systematically shabby. But there were lots of little leaks (for example, about disgruntled agents being retasked) that suggested there really was a mad rush involving many, many agents. So what were all those FBI agents spending all that time doing?
Here’s a guess: Scouring CSAM photos and videos for anything that could reveal specific culprits (in particular combinations that could put abusers and victims in the same room), places, or times. That kind of open-ended forensic analysis — which involves video, audio, content analysis, and a dozen levels of metadata — is painstakingly slow, often frame by frame. What are you looking and listening for? Birthmarks or tattoos? Peculiar pieces of clothing? Art on the wall or photos on the desk? Clocks that indicate the time, or lighting that could indicate the seasons or, in rare cases, even a particular day? Arrangements of objects, products on a table, how sheets are disheveled? Identifiable garments? Voices or background sounds?
Those agents couldn’t be told flag any video where you see Trump (or whoever), but they could be told *flag for further analysis any video where you see or hear anything that potentially identifies a person, place, and/or time.” It’s easy to imagine the bottlenecks that would result, as successive layers of large-scale work were delegated to an ever-shrinking pool of “trusted” appointees.
But, wait, why would they do that, since CSAM videos can’t be released. True — but it’s not so simple. There’s no clear line between what is and isn’t CSAM — no reliable index, no scribbled note on the back of a photo or README on a CD-ROM. So every single file needed to be examined with the question who or what could it give away? That’s exactly the question this kind of investigation, analysis, and redaction should address. But, as with all things Trumpy, it was backwards: it wasn’t about investigating crimes, it was about protecting Trump & Co.
It all seems almost boringly obvious.